What Faith?

This week a group of first-rank Protesant leaders finally stood up to be counted.

Few things better illustrate the reason U.S. churches do not enjoy a more impressive leadership in American life than heir shilly-shallying about the war. In he eight months since Pearl Harbor, only one major denomination (the United Lutheran Church) has placed itself unequivocally behind the U.S. war effort. Yet no major church has had the courage to take the opposite stand, and state unequivocally that the church's job is religion, not war.

Unequivocal Stand. "This war must be won by the United Nations. At issue are our Christian concept of man's destiny, and our opportunity, for years to come, to work toward a larger earthly fulfillment of that destiny. As Christians we cannot remain silent."

The 87 men who signed this statement are as notable as the statement itself. They include President Luther A. Weigle of the Federal Council of Churches, Presiding Bishop Henry St. George Tucker of the Episcopal Church, Moderator Stuart Nye Hutchison and Stated Clerk William Barrow Pugh of the Presbyterian Church in the U.S.A., President Joseph C. Robbins of the Northern Baptist Convention, Douglas Horton, Secretary and Minister of the Congregational-Christian Churches, Quaker Frank Aydelotte, "Y" General Secretary Eugene Epperson Barnett, 16 college and seminary presidents (headed by Princeton's Harold Willis Dodds and Union's Henry Sloane Coffin), ten Methodist bishops, five Episcopal bishops, and such other ecclesiastic bigwigs as John R. Mott, Reinhold Niebuhr, Edgar DeWitt Jones, Roy G. Ross, Daniel A. Poling.

Speaking as "individual Christians," the 87 signatories declared: "We believe we express the mind and conscience of an overwhelming majority, not only of American Christians but also of that larger community of Christians which transcends national lines and, even in nations at war, remains unbroken. We do not fail to remember that we are united with our foes by a common humanity and by our common need of divine grace. We renounce hatred and vengeance. . . . That our nation is by no means guiltless of the sins of omission and commission which have made this war, we penitently acknowledge. . . . We do not concede, however, that the responsibility of America and of the United Nations for this war is of a piece with that of the leaders of those nations whose aggressions began it."

The Price of Peace. "In the outcome of this war ethical issues are at stake to which no Christian can remain indifferent. Totalitarian aggression must be halted or there will be no peace and order in the world. Our nation has faced that issue and made its choice. . . . Our consciences, as Christians, support that decision. . . . Victory for the Axis powers would bring moral and spiritual disaster for their own people no less than for those of the conquered nations. As Christians we face these facts and wholeheartedly assume our share of the price which must be paid in effort, sacrifice and suffering to save mankind from such a fate. . . .

"Confidently, therefore, and humbly we seek God's guidance and strength as we dedicate ourselves to the defeat of the aggressors now at large in the world and to the establishment of that world order to which Christians and men of good will in all lands aspire and for which the military victory of the United Nations has now become indispensable."

In their statement the Protestant leaders also listed four goals which the churches must persuade America to adopt as "the foundation of that future for which we pray":

1) "Prepare for the sacrifices necessary to make industrial production the servant of the common good";

2) "Renounce prejudice of color, class and race, both within our nation and toward other nations";

3) "Assume our responsibility as a nation for the ordered life of a community of nations";

4) "Bring out of the present agony a happier and juster world than man as yet has known."

Missing Link. Conspicuously absent from this program is any mention of the church's--and the country's--biggest lack in fighting World War II: a great dynamic faith. Only Germany and Russia, the two nations most hostile to Christianity, have shown such a faith.

Last week other church statesmen testified to this need in moving words. Cried the Anglican Bishop of Chichester in a transatlantic broadcast: "We must have a faith equal to that of the Nazis or we shall not win." Said the new Archbishop of Canterbury in a letter to the London Times: "To many of us it seems that what is needed is not a new political device, but a new temper of mind and a new spiritual approach." John Foster Dulles and Walter Van Kirk, chairman and secretary, respectively, of the Federal Council's Commission to Study the Bases of a Just and Durable Peace (TIME, March 16), emphasized the lack on their return to the U.S. from a month's meetings with British leaders of church & state. Lawyer Dulles, veteran of almost every important peace parley since the 1907 Hague Conference, summarized their findings:

"The present war is largely due to the fact that during the interval between the two world wars we were people without a faith. The first World War exhausted the spiritual springs within us. We wanted merely to be left alone. 'Security' became our only goal. It is, of course, impossible to perpetuate a spiritual vacuum throughout the world. Gradually new faiths began to be born. Unhappily they were not born in Britain, France or the U.S. We were the passive peoples upon whom operated the dynamic faiths born in Russia, Germany and Japan. And because the faiths of Germany and Japan found expression in the deification of their own nation and race they led inevitably to war. The leaders of America, without regard to party or creed, are determined that this shall not happen again. We recognize that military victory will be hardly won, and if won will prove but illusory unless there is born in ourselves that faith which makes men strong and fills them with a sense of mission in the world. We also realize that that faith will lead only to another war unless it be a righteous faith which seeks, in a spirit of brotherhood, to achieve the general welfare."

This somewhat vague abstraction was the closest any Christian leader came last week to defining the missing faith without which victory cannot be won by the United Nations. It was easier to say what that faith was not. It was not a byproduct of social reorganization, nor could it spring from any political and economic program. Where it would spring from no one seemed to know. One churchman suggested a key to the riddle might lie in the words of Isaiah:

Woe to them that go down to Egypt for help; and stay on horses, and trust in chariots, because they are many; and in horsemen, because they are very strong; but they look not unto the Holy One of Israel, neither seek the Lord.

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